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So I bought this WRT310N a couple years ago. It's always been flaky, but I paid too much for it and I can't bring myself to get something different. It has always flaked out during periods of high load - torrenting and multiple simultaneous users always brought the wireless network to a standstill and caused dropped connections. Various manufacturer and 3rd party firmwares made no difference. Probably overheating, amirite?
I always meant to do something about it, but I have a habit of living in a dream world when I "mean to do things", so I never did. My goal this year has been to . or get off the pot.
After acquiring a free backup router in case of failure, I ripped the the WRT310N open. One tiny little heatsink on the switch, nothing on the CPU or wireless radio. Touching the heatsink was painful it was so hot, and the CPU was just as gnarly. The wireless radio chip was just warm. I chopped up an old Northbridge heatsink I had kicking around, and stuck them on the switch/CPU chips with some random Coolermaster paste and a little drop of superglue in the corners. I left the cover off, with a 80mm fan was used to blow air over the bare board. After a month of uptime and rock solid stability, I considered it a complete win.
Then I hacked up the case to make the cooling solution permanent. Pressure fit a quiet 40mm fan, soldered it to the board, and opened up holes for the heatsinks to poke through. Heatsinks are stay cool to the touch (They'd get quite warm without active airflow!). It ain't pretty, but it works. I love it. I'm so stoked.

After a TON of futzing;
For 4.5ghz, all voltages can remain stock except Vcore, which I need to be at 1.27v. I don't know why I thought I had to raise anything else...
Backing down to 4.4ghz, I can run a Vcore of 1.230v. Temperatures drop by ~3*C. Not even close to worth it.
AIDA64 shows a 5watt decrease in power consumption. Sounds consistent with the observed temperature drop.
I'm just going back to [email protected]

Which of the various voltage settings have the greatest effect on your temperatures? VCore, VTT, VCCSA, CPU PLL, etc...
I've got a i5-2500K @ 4.5ghz.
[email protected][email protected]
All other voltages stock.
IBT/OCCT/Prime95/[email protected] stable.
I'm getting load temperatures maxing out at ~68*C.
I'd like to have the lowest possible voltages, with the end goal of the lowest possible core temperatures.

Fairly low amps on the 12V rail, combined with a lack of the 6-pin PCI Express molex, tells me that sucker is a fairly low quality power supply.
It would be worthwhile to upgrade it, even if you decide not to upgrade to the 8800GTX.

Uhhh, is it possible that it's freezing because it's overclocked?
Try running it completely stock. If it doesn't freeze, well, answer is there. Higher temperatures always increase instability. Even if the temperatures aren't into a "dangerous range," a higher temperature when combined with an overclock can easily cause a system to lock up.
Raise the voltage to 1.3. If that doesn't solve all your problems in life, aim for a lower overclock.

There's a couple things that could cause that. My first suspect would be the calibration of the thermal diode in the die itself. I seriously doubt that any chip manufacturer will spend a huge amount of time accurately calibrating the internal diodes to report the exact temp. +/- 5*C sounds like a decent margin of error to me. The lack of calibration doesn't mean the scale is off.
Second suspect would be load balancing. If you're running windows, background processes will only be able to use one core at a time. lsass.exe, svchost, etc... And I remember from back in the day of my Dual Pentium 2 rig, all BIOS events could only be run on processor 0. So one CPU would always run hotter.
Anyways, don't worry about it. Some dual core CPU's even experience the same thing, as well as AMD dual and quad core processor's.

It would probably be a good idea to see if you can manually set the resolution from a .cfg file in the install directory. I remember having issues running Halo PC on my laptop, only fix was to set a super low resolution (320x240) in the config file so it would boot, then I could set it to a tolerable resolution in-game.

My Dell Inspiron is 7 years old. Guess I'm ahead of the game?
I'd look it up for you but unfortunately my CR subscription ended about a week ago. It won't be renew'd, as from my experience with them, they're a step below useless - because you have to pay for it.

Nah, I've tried it with the front panel disconnected also.
Since the jack detection is screwy (Detects random things plugged into random jacks at random times) and no sound, would it be safe to assume the motherboard is fudged? Or could there be other things?